Gulf Futurism

*A weird Arab-futurist ideology bursting out of the circles around “Bidoun” magazine. Huh. Well, it’s one thing to an ultra-wealthy art collector, but when you start writing about art, you might well find yourself with an intellectual position.

*When you’re a Gulf kid in, say, a Qatari design school, it’s hard to do anything much because it’s so obvious that your fate is to mind the oil wells just like dad and grandpa always did. And the foreign hirees on the ground do every other practical and energetic thing in your vicinity. But, you know, this is a globalizing era. You might pick up and leave town, and find another space where your efforts matter. Then, look out.

“In what Al Qadiri calls the Gulf’s “consumer-culture robot desert”, teenage life revolves around the mall, video games and satellite TV. Al-Maria remembers sneaking into the mejus, the men’s side of the house, once everyone was asleep, and spending long nights playing video games and watching global satellite TV. “That was a very unique Gulf experience, existing purely inside the television, the video game, then later my phone and the internet.”

“Al Qadiri was nine when Iraq invaded Kuwait during the 1990 Gulf War. A year later she was playing the Gulf war-inspired Desert Strike video game. “It was the most terrifying sci-fi experience of my childhood,” she recalls. Her new album, also called Desert Strike is an audio memoir of that time. “The most surreal thing was the breakdown of society, and when they burned the oil wells and the sky turned black. It felt like being on the surface of the moon. This record is about the relationship between the virtual and reality of war.” She spent the entirety of the period playing video games indoors, and the 8-bit game soundtracks influence her current sound. She and Al-Maria are working on a music video for the title track that’s inspired by Gulf war memorabilia, such as toy stealth-bombers and children’s playing cards.

“A recurring theme in Gulf futurism is the ubiquity of the shopping mall, the location for everything from covert meetings between the opposite sex to women’s exercise-routines. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a woman in abaya and Nikes jogging through the mall,” Al-Maria laughs. “It’s a beautiful sight!” As a teenager, she remembers leaving the mall with rolled-up pieces of paper with phone numbers that guys had surreptitiously slipped into her bag. “People were having so many boyfriends on the phone.” These days, anonymous teenage sexting means you’re just as likely to get an explicit Bluetooth picture at the mall as a scribbled phone number, which might be why Saudi Arabia banned Bluetooth in malls in 2007. “Back (in the 90s) we’d send pre-internet viral videos, these really primal and bizarre moments,” Al-Maria says, remembering her clandestine teenage communications. “The Gulf is such an extreme place of disconnection that the only thing to do was send videos of other people or animals doing things that you wish you could.”

“Al Maria’s Sci-fi Wahabi is a continuing art project in which she becomes a fierce, laser-sunglasses-wearing, abaya-clad alter ego, reminiscent of something from an 80s Gulf Star Trek remake….”